Rowena Young

Rowena Young is the Programme Director of Social Innovation and Finance at NESTA. She oversees the creation of challenges, designed to test and understand the systems of innovation that contribute to the resolution of social problems. NESTA’s current portfolio majors on health, the environment and the social finance market. 

Rowena is also a Fellow of the Skoll Centre and was the Founding Director of the Skoll Centre, overseeing its development from 2004 to 2007.

The Skoll Centre was launched in November 2003 at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University, to promote the advancement of social entrepreneurship worldwide. It was created with a donation by the Skoll Foundation.  Rowena has been a part of the UK social entrepreneurship movement from the outset. First, working at the leading think-tank, Demos, then heading up operations and business development respectively at two leading ventures – Children’s Express, which enables 8-18 year-olds to influence issues which affect them by publishing in mainstream news media, then Kaleidoscope, a highly innovative illicit drug treatment agency.

In 2000, she launched simplyworks, a web-enabling business that continues to create training and employment for long-term drug users today. Her work for the Foreign Policy Centre, From War to Work: drug treatment, social inclusion and enterprise (2002), drew on experience across Asia and encouraged a more preventive government strategy.

Before joining the Saïd Business School, Rowena was Chief Executive of the School for Social Entrepreneurs. The School was launched by Michael Young (founder of some 60 public benefit organisations including the Open University and the Consumers’ Association) to transform the effectiveness of social entrepreneurs. 

Throughout this period, Rowena also worked in a number of voluntary positions. As vice-chair of governors, she was part of a strategic team, which turned around the worst failing school in the country. She has been a board member of Children’s Express and the Social Enterprise Coalition; an advisor to MySociety and screener for the Schwab Foundation; a commissioner on the Joseph Rowntree Inquiry on drug-testing; and a judge for the Guardian’s Public Service Awards, the DTI’s Enterprising Solutions, New Statesman’s Upstart and Arts and Business awards. 

She is also writing on: Barriers to the mobilisation of new levels of social investment; The dearth of radicalism in the social enterprise movement; The state of the social entrepreneurship movement from a social movements perspective; The market-in-prospect for low carbon, pro-poor businesses in developing countries.

She is a member of VSO’s UK committee, chair of the board at People Tree, has a unique fair trade fashion company trading in Japan and the UK, and is an advisor to NPI, the Non-Profit Incubator in China.

Rowena started her career in journalism.

Publications

Rowena contributed the chapter, 'For What It Is Worth: social value and the future of social entrepreneurship', to the Skoll Centre's collection, Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of sustainable social change edited by Dr Alex Nicholls (OUP 2006).

'From War to Work: Drug Treatment, Social Inclusion and Enterprise' (published by the Foreign Policy Centre, 2002).